BIDA Attendance Update

December 6th, 2016
bida, contra
There's a discussion on the contra dance organizers list about attendance. Several organizers had noticed lower attendance lately, and were wondering if it was just their dance or if it was something shared. Here's what things look like for BIDA:

Update 2016-12-07: this is somewhat distorted by family dances, where we occasionally open the hall two hours early and do a family dance followed by a potluck before our regular dance. We've had ~4 of them, and they typically have higher attendance because they attract some people who wouldn't have come otherwise. Instead of trying to figure out what attendance would have been for those nights if we hadn't had the family portion, here's a version of the graph that excludes those evenings:

(I had already excluded "Spark in the Dark" dances.)

This is pretty positive; since the last time I looked at this we've moved from averaging ~100 to ~150, a large enough change that it's been over two years since we last had a dance with fewer than 100 dancers. So it looks like we're in decent shape.

(Right now what's awkward about the discussion is I suspect dances with recently lower attendance are much more likely to post because the discussion feels more relevant. And posting saying "our attendance is up" could even feel like bragging.)

Referenced in: BIDA Attendance

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Some thoughts on sexual harassment

I.

via Thing of Things September 30, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)